1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a test case generation apparatus, a generation method therefor, and a program storage medium storing a program for generating a test case, and to a program verification technique, for example.
2. Related Art
Designing of a test case using a state transition diagram is known as an effective method for creating a systematic test case. When the calculation process of a computer system is abstracted into a state transition diagram, a comprehensive test case is represented by a path that covers all states or all transitions. Because a state transition diagram can be regarded as a directed graph, various approximation solutions are known for the problem of test case generation by reducing to a problem of generating the shortest path that covers the nodes or arcs of a directed graph (e.g., traveling salesman problem, Chinese postman problem, or the like).
As actual computer systems have complex internal states, when the abstraction level of a state transition diagram is low, the state transition diagram would have an extremely large number of states and a corresponding test case would be also very large. On the other hand, when the abstraction level of a state transition diagram is high, it would have less states and a corresponding test case would be also small, but it is necessary to create a state transition diagram with abstraction applied according to the purpose of a test.